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Considered one of the most influential painters working today, Luc Tuymans is highly regarded for his compositions that draw on visual techniques from photography and film. Born in Antwerp, Tuymans studied art and art history in Brussels for several years, holding his first solo exhibition of paintings in 1986. In addition to painting, Tuymans has also studied film, printmaking, and photography, and is concerned with the nature of representation in these art forms as well as in mass media as a whole. He depicts everyday figures, architectural sites, and other ordinary subjects in his works but often gives his pieces titles alluding to World War II and other somber topics. When given such austere titles, his images evoke narratives of trauma, violence, and anxiety, questioning the limits of memory and representation in painting. In recent works, Tuymans has used imagery from cell phone cameras and other new technologies as the source material for his paintings. His work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. Tuymans’ work was recently the subject of a retrospective co-organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
